Few things are more frustrating than to make a major investment that doesn’t pay off. In the case of hiring professional fundraisers, not only is it upsetting, but strategic initiatives and growth suffer.  In today’s high-pressure philanthropic environment, getting the right fundraiser on your team and supporting his or her success is more crucial than ever before.

In the last eighteen months, BetterSchools has conducted several capital campaign feasibility studies for our clients, using our exclusive “3-C Analysis”. For each client we facilitated a process that included upwards of forty interviews with individuals identified as those who would be important in the success of the campaign. While our methodology remains consistent to ensure a quality outcome, our recommendations are as unique as the school communities we are partnered with.

Someone, at Lake Superior State University (Lake State Lakers) has blessed us again with an annual list of words and phrases that need banishment from common use. Not because they are offensive or vulgar, but because they are useless:  vague, imprecise, overused.

Organizations rarely consider how much their job descriptions reveal about them. For a savvy fundraising professional, job descriptions are a looking glass into the opportunities and barriers they might encounter in the role. The fundraiser understands that his or her job description reflects a culture and a philosophy, an approach to planning and hiring, and insight into how fundraising performance will be evaluated.

In the last post on the CESA heads surveys, conducted in the spring of this year, we looked at this group of school leaders’ views of the educational marketplace, primarily its effect on enrollment and re-enrollment.

Around 2008, two colleagues, Tim Wiens and John Seel, and I launched an exploration into the feasibility of a new independent school association. For a number of years, we had been occasionally discussing our sense that too many schools with Christian identities, whether parochial, non-denominational, or otherwise, trailed non-sectarian and more elite historically Christian schools in terms of both reputation and educational quality.

I spoke earlier this week with a head of school who has spent many hours in the past month meeting one on one with the parents of middle schoolers who are making noise about transferring to other schools-mostly public schools. “I started out with a list of 34 kids,” he told me, “and we have worked the list down to about 15 who still might leave.”

Increased competition within the schooling marketplace, combined with the shifting priorities of a new generation of parents, has rendered the fortunes of independent and parochial schools more uncertain than ever before. As we have noted here previously, as of just two years ago, private schools enrolled more than 10% fewer students than in 2000. And within that overall enrollment decline is the even more ominous statistic that enrollment in grades K-8 is down nearly 17%.